Temporary fence is increasingly becoming a fixture around construction sites and special events for safety, security, crowd control, or simply to restrict access. Temporary fences are constructed in numerous ways and from a variety of materials. Most commonly these barriers are constructed of posts driven into the ground, with rolled chain link mesh or plastic safety netting attached to the posts with wires or clips. Increasingly, however, prefabricated fence panels are being used in temporary applications due to the speed of installation and/or removal, longevity, enhanced security, and the flexibility of being able to easily remove and then re-install one or more panels to allow for short term access.
These prefabricated temporary fence panels are largely comprised of panels constructed by attaching chain link mesh to a tubular framework. While these panels have several advantages as previously mentioned, their bulkiness typically creates a handling and storage problem that is significant, particularly when one considers the number of times these reusable fence sections are handled, stored, reused, etc.
In one prior art fence assembly, for example, panels typically have rings permanently attached to vertical framing members. During installation, a post is placed through the rings of adjacent panels and then into a stand or driven into the ground. The post supports the panels in an upright position as well as connecting them together to form a structure.
Other prior art panels have been attached to the post or directly to each other through the use of a bolt-on clamping bracket. Arguably, this kind of connection may be more secure, however, the time necessary to bolt the panels to the post make the assembly and disassembly process relatively time consuming. In addition, although the typically large attachment rings on the framework of these panels are efficient for installation purposes, those large rings exacerbate the problems of handling and storage, such as by spacing the panels from each other when stacked in storage.
Rather than chain link, panels may also be constructed of welded wire mesh attached to the tubular framework. In some cases, the welded wire mesh has one or more horizontal bends in the surface to stiffen the mesh instead of the horizontal tubular framing members. This alternative design, combining stiffening horizontal bends with vertical tubular framing members, may reduce some of the material cost but has little or no impact on the handling and storage problem mentioned above, given that the stacking thickness of the panel is still typically determined by the dimensions of the tubular members.
Although theoretically these panels of welded wire mesh with horizontal stiffening bends and/or horizontal framing members may be fixed directly to the posts by a bolted clamping bracket or similar means, the additional labor for installing these clamps and the requisite precision in spacing the posts has not made this a viable option for temporary fence applications.